There is no Snapdragon 815, Qualcomm confirms

A lot of rumours regarding an alleged upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon 815 SoC have been floating around, and now the chipmaker has informed us that that no such chip exists.

Qualcomm's Senior Director of Public Relations Jon Carvill told Fudzilla that there is no Snapdragon 815 in the works:

Carvill was clear:

“There are no plans for a Snapdragon 815 processor.”

Snapdragon 815 filed under creative journalism

The Snapdragon 815 rumours spread like wildfire, but since they didn’t make much sense, we decided not to carry them. Basically the alleged Snapdragon 815 was supposed to be a 16nm SoC with four Cortex-A72 and Cortex-A53 cores, but the rest of the spec was hard to swallow.

Long story short, there is no such thing as a Snapdragon 815. The company never had such a product, and if you know a thing or two about SoC development, it takes years to make a new SoC design from scratch – you don’t just design a new one for a new node out of the blue.

It would be very convenient if the company managed to pull off something like this, but it’s simply not possible.

Qualcomm’s next flagship is the Snapdragon 820

Now that we debunked this rumour, we should focus on Qualcomm’s real next generation flagship SoC – the Snapdragon 820.

The company mentioned the Snapdragon 820 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but it looks like that it will be a while before we see this chip shipping in actual devices. Qualcomm expects the new part to sample sometime in the second half of the year, so in the best case scenario we might see the first devices by the end of the year, but most products based on the new chip will start shipping in early 2016.

The 20nm Snapdragon 810 is not overheating, it works just fine, and we tested it inside the HTC One M9. We can confirm that it ends up significantly faster than the Snapdragon 801, which we had a chance to try in a few phones.